If you want church and state together, you would probably like what's happening in Russia and Georgia (country, not state) where those governments are further leaning more and more on the religious orthodox institutions to stay in power.
Its why Moscow is currently going on the offense against LDS in that country (all 5 of them) because they're "CIA Agents," which is amazingly still the same card used for the last 70 years against anybody they don't like.
And then you get incidents like this:
A throng of thousands led by priests in black robes surged through police cordons in downtown Tbilisi, Georgia, on Friday and attacked a group of about 50 gay rights demonstrators. Carrying banners reading “No to mental genocide” and “No to gays,” the masses of mostly young men began by hurling rocks and eggs at the gay rights demonstrators.
The police pushed most of the demonstrators onto yellow minibuses to evacuate them from the scene, but, the attackers swarmed the buses, trying to break the windows with metal gratings, trash cans, rocks and even fists.
In this world of ours when people in the name of religion terrorize and oppress others out of methodical determination as if we're living in the last days of upcoming apocalypse or clash of cultures, seperation of church and state is a principle that's proven to be just and sensical more and more.
And Jefferson abso-fucking-lutely understood this centuries ago, when it came to the Church of England. As much as he and the other Founding Fathers believed in democracy, they knew its history in Rome and Greece when minority populations were oppressed with popular support from the majority.
He was a very devout man*, but he pushed forward the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
which de-established the Church of England as the state (colonial) church. He didn't ban religion, he didn't ban the Church of England. He probably might be puzzled (to say the least) about the amount of secularism in culture today. But none the less he believed that church/state are just two things that should stay seperate in general for the greater good.
He was so proud of that Statute, he had it listed as one of his achievements on his epitaph. (Interesting note: His Presidency wasn't listed as one of them.)
*=I have no evidence, but I would like to believe if he saw the religious right today and their ridiculous wars against science and knowledge, he would be revolted. Of course he might also be queasy with the whole no-slavery thing but who knows?
